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In 2002, an IT company quietly formed, working primarily in Web-based applications, Web site development and niche software products. Flash forward seven years, and LPiT Solutions now has become an industry leader in tracking biological products in health care facilities.

“Really, for the first several years we were an IT consulting shop, a Web development shop, did some network infrastructure, some management services,” said John Post III, president of the company.

In 2006, Scott MacGregor joined the company as an equal partner with Post.

“Scott was instrumental in helping the company switch from a custom application development company to more of a software products-based focus.”

At the time, the company was moving into the health care field. New federal regulations about how tissue samples must be handled created a need for a new tracking solution, and Tissue TrackCore was born. The product is a real-time Web-based solution to help health care facilities comply with FDA standards concerning tracking. From the moment a biological product is received by a hospital, the hospital is responsible for knowing where that product is at all times and who has handled it, as well as the final disposition of the product.

“We partnered with some local health care professionals. Hospitals that are accredited by the Joint Commission — there’s about 6,000 out there nationally — they have a whole set of rules and regulations to adhere to in order to get government funding,” said Post. “There’s an area that they made a new regulation around for biologic tissue-handling processes and procedures.”

Post said that when a local hospital was found to not be in compliance with those regulations, it started searching for a software-related solution and wasn’t able to find anything.

“Because of a West Michigan tie and a personal relationship, I got the call,” said Post. “Once LPiT took a look at the regulations, we quickly realized that this is something that all hospitals across the country were going to need.”

LPiT launched Tissue TrackCore locally in 2006 and nationally in 2007. In the following two years, the company brought 76 hospitals online, with roughly 150 more in signed contracts and approximately 190 additional pending.

LPiT Tissue TrackCore is used at Stanford University and the Cleveland Clinic, among others.

Companies only need Internet access to use the service, which comes from a secure Web site.

“It’s a completely Web-based solution. The interesting part of that is hospital systems’ IT departments — with all the upgrades and everything that’s going on in hospitals now-a-days — they’re bogged down completely,” said Post. “The result is that, as a Web-based solution, as an application service provider, the hospitals only need Internet access to access our system.”

The tracking process begins right at the loading dock. The platform for the system can utilize either barcode scanning or manually entering the information.

“So a Joint Commissioner could walk into your hospital right now and say, ‘We know that you’ve received a bone from vendor XYZ. Show us documentation that you know where it is at this exact time. Show us documentation that you have proof of every person that’s handled it while it’s been in your care. Show us documentation that it’s been used or thrown away — final disposition,’” said Post.

“With our system, the individual who is going to the storage location to pull out these products double clicks our icon, logs in, pulls these items out of inventory, and barcode scans the labels on them. Our system recognizes them, and they choose from what am I doing with it. They verify the Joint Commission regulation requirements, they hit save and log out.”

Post said that much of hospital personnel’s tasks are based around tracking and documentation, which is one of the reasons Tissue TrackCore has been so popular: It helps streamline the process. The typical ROI for Tissue TrackCore is three to six months.

Post said companies now are using Tissue TrackCore to track implanted products such as pacemakers.

“If a hospital is putting something in you in a procedure, typically they’re responsible to know where that is at any given time,” he said. “Our hospitals are using (our product) to track all of their implants. Many of them are using us to track biological implants and non-biological implants.”

LPiT Solutions is currently working on two new software solutions for hospitals in need of work-flow solutions.

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